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VisualEditor
MediaWiki developers are working on VisualEditor (VE), a way to edit pages without needing to learn wikitext markup. It sits alongside the original wikitext editor and lets you choose which one you want to use for each edit. VisualEditor is in beta testing. It can't yet do everything that the wikitext editor can do, still has some bugs, and is slow for some users and on large pages. Developers intend VisualEditor to be a better editor for all users, new and experienced. You can insert a citation, an image or edit a complex template. ' For the latest information about Wikia's use of VisualEditor, see .' Internet Explorer VisualEditor does not yet work with Internet Explorer 9 (and will never work with Internet Explorer 8 or older). Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor, a way of editing wikis being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Editors have long had to learn some wikimarkup to make most edits. In 2001, this difficulty was acceptable; in 2014, it drives away some contributors. VisualEditor will allow people to edit all pages without having to learn wikitext markup and will hopefully encourage more readers to become editors. Even after the eventual anticipated full-feature release of VisualEditor, experienced editors still may prefer editing wikitext because they find it faster and more precise. Editing articles purely in wikitext is and will remain an option that the Wikimedia Foundation has no plans to remove. Even editors who enable VisualEditor will have the wikitext option available from the toolbar above each article, user page and section. __TOC__ About VisualEditor VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing wikis that allows people to contribute without having to learn wikimarkup. It was made available as an opt-in release on the English-language Wikipedia back in December 2012, in 14 other languages in April 2013, and in most other languages at the beginning of June 2013. Deployments began in July 2013. The Wikimedia Foundation developers expect to make it available to almost all Wikimedia Foundation projects by the end of 2014. As of May 2014, it is available by default to users of about 60% of the language editions of Wikipedias and as an opt-in beta feature to the rest, along with a handful of non-Wikipedia projects. To learn more about using VisualEditor, please read the guide to VisualEditor and the list of common keyboard shortcuts. Your help with the many tasks that need to be done is appreciated. You can also receive regular status updates on your talk page by signing up for the VisualEditor newsletter. VisualEditor still has many bugs and missing features. I Limitations Current known limitations include: * Cannot be used in conjunction with Semantic Forms * Slow - Loading longer pages into VisualEditor generally takes more time than the old wikitext editor, although this has improved significantly. * Not available in talk or discussion namespaces – At the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is enabled for the following Wikipedia namespaces: Article, Help, File, Category, Book, Portal, Draft, and User (the latter allows editors to make changes in a personal sandbox). It is not enabled for any talk pages, or in the Wikipedia: namespace (because it is mainly used for discussions), or the MediaWiki: or Template: namespaces (which will need specialised editing tools). It is expected that Flow will provide discussion namespace editing. On pages other than those in the namespaces mentioned, the "Editbeta" button is not currently available. * Cannot edit a single section – VisualEditor loads and submits only entire pages. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. Section editing does not reduce edit conflicts. * Template parameters are wikitext, not rich edited – VisualEditor lets you edit the parameters of template transclusions, but only as "wikitext" (so "Foo" not "Foo"). * Nested templates aren't very easy (e.g. }}) – VisualEditor lets you edit template transclusions which themselves use templates ("nested" templates). This is unlike the old Visual Mode editor of Wikipedia:Wikia, which just gave up if this was used, but because template parameters are edited as wikitext it's clunky. * Limited browser support – VisualEditor currently works only in relatively modern (last three years) versions of Chrome/Chromium, Firefox/Iceweasel, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Midori, Qupzilla, SeaMonkey and WebPositive (approximately 93% of all users). * "Weird" templates – struggles with templates that pass a bit of incomplete code, with markup, to another template or table, such as ones that fill in multiple parameters of a table by passing, for example, param1|''param2'' - this is a difficult problem to code around, but usually unnecessary. * Incomplete editing functionality – The content of some "complex" formatting, including definition lists and multi-column layouts, will display and can be edited, but editors using VisualEditor cannot modify certain details, and table editing on mobile doesn't work properly. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities. * Only supports Vector and Monobook skins – of the four skins available in Wikipedia user preferences, VisualEditor currently only works with Vector and Monobook. Because of these limitations and the many remaining bugs in VisualEditor, the developers recommend that VisualEditor users click "Review your changes" before saving a page. External links * The mediawiki.org page about VisualEditor, including the regular status reports * The mediawiki.org page about Parsoid, the bidirectional wiki parser behind VisualEditor and its regular status reports References Category:VisualEditor